‘I like the flow of constant work’: Artist Adam Pendleton on how discipline leads to creativity

The artist, whose new show just opened at the Hirshhorn Museum, talks about the value of carving out space and time for creative practices.

When artist Adam Pendleton was growing up in Richmond, Virginia, he started his own newspaper that he delivered to the residents at a nursing home in his town. “I wanted to be a creative person functioning in the world,” he says. “I wanted to be an artist.” Over the years, that inclination took various forms: a t-shirt business (which he now laughs that, as a teen, he saw as a fashion line), script-writing, musical theater, original poetry.